At 750 metres above Trapani, often inside a cloud, Erice is a perfect triangle of cyclopean walls and cobbled lanes where the ancient Mediterranean worshipped the goddess of love: Venus Erycina, whose sanctuary stood where the Norman castle now climbs above the Balio gardens. On clear days you see the Egadi islands and, they say, even Cape Bon in Tunisia.
The warm custard "genovesi" from Maria Grammatico's pastry shop — she learned the art in a convent — are a ritual. And for decades the Ettore Majorana centre has drawn the world's physicists up here: science and myth, in the same thin mist.
Near Erice
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
